Opinion Contributor

We need a new Voting Rights Act

Lawmakers should honor those who marched 50 years ago, the authors write. | AP Photo

By TOM PERRIELLO and DANIELLA GIBBS LÉGER | 8/21/13 10:06 AM EDT

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington — an historic event that helped to build the political will to pass the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 — we do a disservice if we commemorate the day as if it made this historic legislation inevitable.

Let’s not forget the brutal congressional fight that only ended when dozens of senators and representatives, particularly Democrats, voted for what is right at direct cost to their party’s political interests. Now 50 years later, saving the VRA might require a similar act of statesmanship, this time by Republicans, to put the integrity of American democracy above Machiavellian partisan interests.

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Put bluntly, every effort to restrict voting rights across America is being pursued by Republicans. That’s new: During the most vicious periods of racial segregation, laws designed to suppress African-American votes were motivated overwhelmingly by insidious racial bigotry and were heavily concentrated in the South by leaders from both parties. But today, Republicans across the country are designing laws to suppress African-American, Latino, and young votes primarily to rig the electoral system in swing states that determine control of Congress and the White House, independent of traditional racial animus as a motivating factor. Yet because of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to gut the core provision of the VRA, the task of guaranteeing the votes of minorities, young people, and the elderly now sits in the hands of congressional Republicans.

In June, the court’s conservative majority struck down the constitutionality of Section IV of the VRA, which designates the states and localities that must pre-clear changes to voting laws with the Department of Justice, thus creating a pre-emptive protection of the right to vote. In explaining the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically” relating to race and voting in America.

But egregious attempts to restrict voting rights can still be found in old Dixie states. Within days of the Supreme Court decision, six states with histories of pernicious voting suppression moved swiftly to restrict voting rights, unchecked by the preclearance process, with Florida looking to resume its voter purge.